Too many segments on your activities?

In segment-dense areas, it is hard for Strava to display all segments on one activity, so we developed a segment popularity rating. Depending on the number of times a segment is viewed, that segment is either visible on the activity or "hidden" due to a low popularity rating. You can hide and unhide Segments to customize which segments will be visible to you throughout Strava. By "Hiding" a segment, you vote to decrease its popularity and hide that segment on all of your activities. When you "Unhide" a segment, you increase its popularity rating and vote to show that segment on all of your activities. Please note that the Run activity pages do not have this feature, and instead use Starred Segments.

To hide a segment on your ride:

Go to your activity on the Strava website and hover over the segment in the list that you wish to hide.

A "Hide" button will appear in the rightmost area of the segment row. Clicking "Hide" will prevent you from seeing this segment listed under any activity throughout the site

To view all hidden segment for an activity, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Show Hidden Segments".

Comments

Yeah I totally agree. I have a guy near me that made 8 segments that he calls loops and they are each over 20 miles! He is the only one who has ever completed the segment and he only did it once in the last five months. It makes exploring for segments so annoying in that area..

Theoretically the "Hide/Unhide" buttons are "the first step" of doing this, however, they don't seem very effective.

There needs to be a way for the community to tweak faulty segments. There are a few on the very, very popular "Silver Comet Trail" in Atlanta that do not match the descriptions, have misspellings, are redundant/obscure or start in arbitrary places. It would be great if there was a mechanism (think google maps "edit mode") to do this.

I totally agree. Segments should be flaggable for bad GPS data or redundancy as well. But a community/wiki like way of editing would make it even better. There should be a way (and ambition within the strava team) to move to valuable segments instead of every ride being completely cluttered with overlapping shitty segments for every piece of road.

And there are also the segments that are so complex to do, that no one else is able or willing to repeat that strange an unique sequence of turns. Those usually are easy to spot ,because they usually have only one athlete in the board! After some time, the segments with only one rider, should also be cleaned.

Completely disagree. I want the freedom to create whatever segments I choose and as a premium paying member feel I should have that privilege. Part of the problem is that many people are sloppy in the way they create segments. Someone segmenting a climb for example, will often include a portion of the flat stretch leading up to the climb and a portion of the downhill past the summit. That's not an entirely accurate reflection of the effort required to complete just the climb. Another example - someone will create a segment and include a minor piece of a turn at the end of segment. If you don't make the same turn, you don't see the segment.

A better option to me would be to allow individual users to SHOW or NOT SHOW segments they aren't interested in. This seems a better path than restricting a user's ability to create a segment that might be more beneficial to them than the ones that already exist.

For the record, this should not be about restricting privileges to create segments.

It's fine if you want to exercise your privilege to create whatever segments you like, it becomes a problem if rides get stuffed with segments that in a growing number of cases don't seem to have any added value. At the moment we have an option to set segments to private or not and a possible solution could be that segments only become public by some community process, voting, favoured, etc.

Hiding segments for individual users already is an option by the way. But as Greg says, people are sloppy and at times there are more as a couple segments on the same stretch or climb. To keep the competition going it would IMHO good if we can vote the best of them to be the one we all compete on.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that people shouldn't create segments that are relevant to them. They would simply rather that they were marked as private if they are unlikely to be contested amongst the wider population.

Poorly created segments are one of the problems that would be addressed by this suggestion.

At present some segments are hidden by default and any segment can be hidden by going to the list of segments at the bottom of an activity page and to the right of the 'Time' column is a 'Hide' button (which is fittingly hidden, until you hover over it). It's a start, but it's still a pain to identify which segments are worthwhile and which are junk, especially as conflicting segments will most likely have very similar names. This is where a crowdsourced effort would definitely come in handy.

If you could filter segments by the number of rides completed (more than 10, for example) on the exploration interface it would help cut down some noise. Alternatively, someone who wants to find a KOM with little competition and invert the filter. :)

Another useful filter would be to see segments used by the people in your cohort (your followers and people you follow). This would tend to show the quality segments.

Good comment Duane - establishing segment legitimacy by voting is the solution!

I think it would add to the overall feel of Strava to clean up (or hide) all the unused or worthless segments. I think the best solution is by having a "vote button" and then Strava can just show those segments that local users find most useful. My first experience with Strava had me going into fits about segment issues. There still are trail segments that keep popping up that don't even follow the trail (they are more of a GPS error - see image) and it would be nice to have those purged and replaced with the "real" trail on a real route. Then we could all compete on a similar set of segments/routes.

Bad names: some people really need to learn how to name them. There are segments with typos, there are silly names like "ride to work". These segments are often valuable but the names are frustrating.

Duplicates: often because someone creates the original with a bad start or end point, someone else creates the valid one. Unfortunately you are left with multiple ones clogging up your stats.

I'd like to see:

The ability to contact the modify a segment created by someone else. Even if you have a suggestion, like tweaking the name or start/end and letting the creator accept or reject the change.

Hiding the segment doesn't currently work as when you review a ride you can see you have hidden ones and you end up looking at them in case they are new. You need to be able to configure you profile to ignore specific segments.

Oh, there is already a dabate about this... "I thought it was just me..." (notice that I'm from a little city that has few Strava users)

hahahahahahahahahahaha

I just wrote a ticket about this... =[

Here are my points:

First of all, Strava is groing! So there will be (let's be audacious) billions users soon, and with that lots os segments too... We like the freedom, but we also need some order in this caos... some thing self regulated by the comunity it self. There isn't anyway that just Strava personel handle this... We need a good bot controlling it and/or a user's moderator community...

Ok, we'll set some moderators (like 4sq for exemple). But kill segments based just on moderators thoughts is just too subjective, even with "house rules". There will be some places that will not have local moderators, how to deal with that?

Strava should have two explorers, a main one as public and another one that you could see all your friends/clubs segments. As private your segment will not be at the public explorer, but all your friend will be able to see it. At the public one will be K/QOM, records till 10th place, PR, all archievements... At private/friends/clubs explorer ther will be simple records from you and friends/clubs...

I think every one shoud be able to create segments, this is the thing of this app, create healthy challenges. But these shoud be created as private and than you should request it to be at the public explorer.

After requesting it there will be some kind of voting or moderation that will validate it, rename it if needed, fix every thing at the segment that is needed... Then it will go public...

I don't know... these things are a little bit complex, but I totally recommend Strava to look the Four Square moderation system.

One thing is right, if this mess keeps groing... bad segment names, duplicated segments, tons of segments at the same point, bad GPS segments, bad start/end points, etc... we all will get crazy and mad and migrate to some other place...

There was a blog on Strava when they first introduced the private feature. I vaguely remember, that it's basically a voting feature. If you click on a segment and look at it, you're essentially giving it a positive vote and if you hide it you're giving it a negative vote. And if enough people just don't look at it that effects it negatively too. I'm just summarizing what I read a long time ago and I may be slightly off, but that was the jist of it.

I agree about the names, it would be great if there was a way to make them more accurate or just have them spelled right.

Although I think the hide feature solves most of the issues people have. I know a better system would be ideal, but it's really pretty good how it is.

As someone suggested, it shouldn't be defined by voting but by times ridden. And for visibility you could have segments on map color coded, say red lines popular ride, orange lines ridden fewer than five times or only by one person and so on and you could filter by popularity.

Also, beeing able to contact creator of segment for edit is essential, or at least flag for correction by strava. Ending a climb way past summit where most people stopped pedaling just isn't acceptable and at the same time flagging the segment and therefor erasing everyone's times isn't right either.

Ah, of course, you are right Vincent, and it is an important difference I didn't think of!

It means I can flag the segment I think has a bad line, which then disappears, and recreate it the way it should be, (new better title, ending at top of hill or whatever the problem), and peoples efforts will reappear on that new segment instead. That is actually pretty usefull.

I managed to get support to delete 2 running segments near me today as they were basically impossible to do due to bad GPS data. After all, I think to "hide" a segment or "flag" it, you actually need to be able to do it.

I also contacted somebody who I guessed created another running segment near me and suggested a final turn was removed which was a bit dangerous and by then the climb had flattened out anyway. Fortunately he agreed and more runners appeared in the modified segment as a result which can only be good.

I agree that is a big problem though. I think I would favour some system of local moderators or perhaps hiding segments that only one person has ever done as generally these are either created through bad data or just plain private - like say starting up a private drive or something. Further if nobody has done it after a few months, think should just be deleted or made private to the creator.

Would also like to see some sort of "score" given to your CRs & KOMs. Some combination of speed/gradient and number of riders/runners would show you and others what your most prized ones are and vice versa.

The above comments appear right on target. There needs to be a means to filter out noise / identify popular segments or show all if thats what you want. Perhaps also to filter by segment length (within a range) to match what you are searching for.

+1, voting system should work, or local moderator's would work great! I'll put my hand up for my area! It would also be good for the local moderator to be displayed somewhere so other local users can contact the moderator to get segments edited/deleted etc without over-using strava support system.

re-reading all the above the public / private idea seems best to me - the question then is "how made public?" I suggest all are public for a period of time - but if the segment has not attracted new members within such period - then segment auto becomes private seen only by creator and his/her friends.

I think you should have the option to "opt out" of segments. By this I mean if there is a segment you think it pointless you simply say, "never add my times to that segment". There should then be a setting which states whether "opted out" segments appear on the map when you "explore segments". "Opting out" should only affect your rides being added to the segment and you viewing them on the map - others may not think it is pointless. The segment owner could maybe be sent a message stating you "opted out", or when they view the segment they get a count of number of riders who "opted out". Hopefully if their segment has no rides and the one similar to theirs has lots they will do the decent thing and delete there one, if they don't I will not care as I will never see it due to the two settings I highlighted.

Maybe if the ratio of "opt out" vs people who stay in gets to a certain level then the segment is automatically deleted.

The idea of local moderators will not work as sometimes the similar segments are due to the creator creating them to suit their favourite rides, ie they start and end and turns they like. If the moderator does similar routes to the creator the same bias will exist. Also some people are rubbish at creating names, if the moderator is rubbish then the situation will not approve. Finally, you'd need so many of them as they'd need to know all the local roads.

And the idea of local moderators is someone who is willing to put some time and effort in, unlike some users who don't bother to crop out parts of rides, quickly make segments and get names wrong, and uses good judgement in making, editing and removing segments.

Or perhaps make a combo out of the voting system and the local mods. When a segment has a certain negative ratio (10 votes for bad, 1 for ok) or a set ammount of negative votes (10 bad votes regardeless of the positive votes) then it should make a notification for a mod to take a look.

And perhaps a way to report a segment directly to the local moderators.